With the technical lifetime of a present day personal, laptop, or notebook computer being only three to five years, there is a tremendous waste as these obsolete systems are discarded. This results in, not only a monetary loss for the user, but also represents an environmental concern.
Generally, there has been little done toward extending the useful life of a computer system. In some cases, performance may be enhanced to extend the system's life. In U.S. Pat. No. 5,610,801, “Motherboard assembly which has a single socket that can accept a single integrated circuit package or multiple integrated circuit packages”, by D. Dent, U.S. Pat. No. 5,610,801, “Motherboard assembly which has a single socket that can accept a single integrated circuit package or multiple integrated circuit packages”, by G. Begis, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,384,692, “Socket with in-socket embedded integrated circuit”, by K. Jaff, pluggable replacement or co-processor chips are taught. In U.S. Pat. No. 6,111,757 “SIMM/DIMM memory module” by Timothy Jay Dell et al. al. and U.S. Pat. No. 5,428,762, “Expandable memory having plural memory cards for distributively storing system data”, by Brian W. Curran, et al. storage capacity is enhanced through memory add-on cards. There has not been, however, ways to override or capture the system from its resident operating system. One could possibly upgrade to a more advanced operating system as in U.S. Pat. No. 5,765,201, “Changing page size in storage media of computer system”, by Mark Gregory Manges, et al. but this is usually costly as upgrades in the system's hardware is desirable to take advantage of the new operating system's features. What is more likely to happen is that the user will replace the entire system at a comparable cost to the operating system and hardware upgrade.
There are other problems with using conventional systems to interface with a network such as the World Wide Web Internet. One such problem is exposing the system to destructive or nuisance viruses or pop-ups. A second problem is the susceptibility to system clogging E-mail Spam. A third problem is the vulnerability of the user's data security and the user's privacy. A fourth problem is the instability of today's complex operating systems resulting in irrecoverable, “fatal”, errors which require the system to be restarted, its hard drive scanned for errors, the fixing of the errors, and the loss of any unsaved data.